More about digitally-emulated feedback

Again, The Old School Is Built On The Ruins Of The New School
was made using AudioMulch,
by patching together various sound processing contraptions into
circuits. The circuits create feedback loops which generate a signal
that is modulated by the interaction of the circuit's constituent
parts. Several nested circuits were constructed, so that signals
from each loop could either be sent to the speakers, fed back into
themselves, or into one of the other loops. This method can be used
to create complex waveforms from very simple chains of components,
in ways which can either be controlled by the performer, or in an
autonomous manner regulated by the construction and interaction
of the feedback loops.

The Old School Is Built On The Ruins Of The New School
was composed in June 2008 for a live gig at Stutter,
the experimental music night held every Wednesday at Horse
Bazaar in Melbourne.

What went right

Old School made a lot of advances over Neither/Nor,
both musically and theatrically. The new piece was designed to have
a more elegant performance interface. Instead of furrowing my brow
glaring at a computer screen, fussing with a mouse making adjustments
and changing connections, I constructed a simple set of control
points which had distinctive, but indirect, effects on the sounds
produced. These control points could then be manipulated through
AudioMulch's Metasurface interface. As with String
Quartet No.2, this enabled me to play the piece with the
laptop open side-on in front of me, like an open book.

The
resulting sounds were more complex than in Neither/Nor,
with much greater variety both in timbres and in phrasing. I particularly
liked the way the loops would cancel each other out from time to
time, suddenly introducing silences of unpredictable lengths. It's
not really relaxing listening, but it keeps you guessing.

What went wrong

My performance at Stutter went on a little too long. I wanted one
last little phrase to finish my set, and the system produced the
longest phrase of the night, for minutes on end before I could subdue
it back into silence.

Although it produced a nice palette of sounds, there turned out
to be no real way to change the basic nature of the system from
one moment to the next, which made the performance feel rather undifferentiated.

My five-year-old laptop is definitely dying. By switching off as
many background processes as possible and reducing the graphics
quality, I had just enough computing power to play the piece live.
Unfortunately I couldn't make a recording of the gig, as putting
the rather sluggish hard drive to work at the same time would have
sent the laptop into seizures.

Live in the studio (i.e. my bedroom)

The two mp3 files below were recorded back at home in London, each
take lasting until the computer overloaded and the audio started
breaking up. The recordings aren't affected by this problem, but
I lost the thread of what was happening and had to stop.